


never felt / like any blessing

by elicitillicit



Series: Volte Face [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, References to Depression, dark AF, pansy also needs closure, pansy jesus christ it's jason bourne parkinson, pansy just needs a goddamn win, pansy needs a hug, this is war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-20 09:51:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18990274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elicitillicit/pseuds/elicitillicit
Summary: Lupin spaces the missions out, so it doesn’t look like high ranking death eaters are suddenly and inexplicably fatally clumsy, but those remaining beef up their security around June, anyways. Pansy can’t blame them. They’re fanatics, not stupid.Still, no one is guarded against a girl who doesn’t exist.Pansy slides through wards designed to keep out anyone less than pureblooded, and draws on her knowledge of every dark hex she memorised while hiding from her father in the library as a child.OR:The Jason Bourne Pansy AU that nobody asked for.





	never felt / like any blessing

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING: this fic is a little on the dark side, because a war is a WAR, and I didn't want to sugarcoat it. It deals with implied child abuse, and suicide, and murder and guilt and depression, all of which are integral to the story and its characters. Pansy is the person she is because of the sum of her experiences. I've tried to treat everything with as much respect as I can, but please let me know if you feel that I could have done better, or been more sensitive.

_who is the betrayer?_

_who's the killer in the crowd?_

_the one who creeps in corridors_

_and doesn't make a sound._

_\- Heavy in Your Arms, by Florence + the Machine_

 

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.

.

 

Historians will mark the return of the Dark Lord on 24 June, 1995, as the starting point of the Second Wizarding War.

 

In another world, the Second Wizarding War would officially last until 2 May, 1998 – the date of the fall of the Dark Lord at the hand of Harry Potter, just a little more than a month shy of its third year.

 

In this world, the war rages on for five terrible, brutal years.

 

.

.

.

 

Pansy dies during the first invasion of Hogwarts. Or – she doesn’t _actually_ die, but for all intents and purposes, her father lowered a coffin labelled _Pansy Parkinson_ with Pansy’s family ring, still smeared with her blood ( _the only thing left of her, poor girl_ ), into the Parkinson family plot.

 

Draco Malfoy attends the funeral, expression stony and blood boiling as he watches Antonin Dolohov grip Mr Parkinson’s arm in sympathy. He commits the moment into memory: the smothering weave of the early morning mist, the undercurrent of vindication and come-uppance, the intricate, roiling vines engraved into Mr. Parkinson’s silver shoe buckles.

 

 _Everything in its time_ , he thinks, ignoring the black itch of the mark eating into his left forearm. There was an afternoon in Dumbledore’s office, three months ago, when he and Harry Potter laid down all of their cards. Dumbledore was a dying man, and he – Draco – no longer trusted his father to keep his mother safe. Cassius Warrington was dead, and the Dark Lord did not care.

 

But – Draco Malfoy has his own story. This one is about Pansy, and how she and other DA members hide in the classrooms spiralling out from the Room of Requirement, and step forward to be Hogwarts’s first line of defence when Draco lets them into Hogwarts before sprinting up to the astronomy tower to play his part.

 

This one is about how Tracey Davis, whose shield charms are iron-clad, is paired up with Pansy, who is legitimately the most aggressive spellcaster in the DA.

 

This story is about how a flash of violet rips through the air and sends both Pansy and Tracey flying back into a classroom. Pansy loses consciousness just after she blinks her eyes open to see Dolohov glance into the room, set the desks on fire, and slam the door shut. 

 

Tracey manages to blast another hole through the wall separating their prison from the next classroom, and drags Pansy through, but having taken the brunt of Dolohov’s curse, it is only hours later when Madam Pomfrey shocks her into wakefulness that they know for sure that Pansy will survive.

 

Except, she tells them: _take my ring and give it to my father_.

 

McGonagall is there, and McGonagall says – _Miss Parkinson -_  

 

 _Pansy_ , she spits, and feels the sludge of her insides shift. Bile floods her mouth, and she turns her head to retch what feels like all of her internal organs out onto her pillow. There’s a flurry of exclamations – and a lot of hastily shouted _scourgifys_ – but when they lower Pansy back onto clean sheets, she inhales again, and whispers – _just Pansy_.

 

Madam Pomfrey forces another blood-replenishing potion into her, and the knot of agony writhing in her chest reaches up her throat and claws her eyes shut once more.

 

She feels cool hands slide her family ring from her index finger.

 

Pansy Parkinson dies.

 

.

.

.

 

She’s given access to 12 Grimmauld Place, and moves straight into one _Regulus Arcturus Black_ ’s room for the sake of its general cleanliness in comparison to every other room in the decrepit old townhouse (it’s still filthy; she wonders if it would be prudent to call Lipsy over to give the place a bit of a mopping, but since she’s supposed to be dead, it’s probably a shit idea). Granger comes to visit shortly after, and rears back upon seeing the little plaque screwed into her bedroom door.

 

 _What?_ Pansy demands, but Granger shakes her head, mute, and comes back an hour later with Ron Weasley in tow.

 

Both of them waste half an hour alternating between gaping at the plaque and whispering furiously amongst themselves – _Harry, but Harry – just three more weeks before his birthday –_ before Pansy loses her shit and points a _sonorous_ at her throat for dramatic effect. _Tell me what the_ fuck _is happening; I_ live _here now, so you can take your all-important golden-trio granian horseshit and knock it right back between your front teeth -_

 

Granger augments her voice just to scream back at her – _it’s none of your business; there is no need for you to know this, so stop being such an interfering harpy –_

 

Weasley takes this for about two minutes before levelling a _silencio_ at both of them. “We need a locket – really ugly, obviously belonged to a Slytherin with absolutely no taste and too much money – but the last time anybody saw it was last summer, when it may have been thrown out. We know that Kreacher stole armfuls of crap back from us, but we’re not sure if it’s there. We’ll have to actually _ask_ him, and the only person who can compel him to do anything is Harry… who is still under the trace, and with his muggle relatives until his birthday. Or a little before his birthday. Nobody knows but Moody, really. CONSTANT VIGILANCE!”

 

He lets both Pansy and Granger yell at him silently for a couple more minutes before scratching at his chin. “Dung could’ve nicked some stuff as well. I guess there’s no harm in checking in on him before Harry can pry anything from Kreacher. Except that I bloody hate Dung. And he’s a piece of hippogriff shit who won’t tell us _anything_.”

 

At this point, Pansy body-checks Weasley, while Granger finally manages to lift the spell on herself.

 

“I can’t _believe_ you _told_ her, Ronald, good _god_ , we’re going to have to _obliviate her-_ ”

 

Pansy shoves her way back into her room, still silenced, and throws her wards up in a fury. They’re not as strong as they could be, but it’s enough to bounce Granger and Weasley back out (although Granger is admittedly half-hearted about breaking through), and they both eventually leave.

 

.

.

.

 

The silencing spell wears off about an hour later, and she immediately starts redoing all the wards in the house. According to McGonagall, the house has like a _thousand_ secret keepers now that Dumbledore is gone, so it’s really far less secure than it could be.

 

She’s supposed to be a dead girl, living in a dead house. At some point, it’s going to feel like she swapped one prison for another, but at least she can control her own safety.

 

Her warding magic is _flawless_. Lipsy had taught her, and Lipsy is the best at protection spells. When Pansy was alone in the house with her father after her mother died, Lipsy _had_ to be the best.

 

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The wards twinge one night, and Pansy’s fingers close around her wand as she tumbles out of bed, grabbing at her robe. She shoves her sleeping mask up into her hair – Daphne had it embroidered with green rhinestones and trimmed in silver satin for her twelfth birthday – as she disillusions herself and does a smokewall charm through the door.

 

She calls on every stealth charm she knows as she tracks the intruder to the long row of cabinets lining the pantry wall. There’s a witchlight set on one of the dusty counters, and he’s just shovelling a mess of rusted old metalware into a backpack – _probably an undetectable extension charm, there_ – not aware at all that he’s got company.

 

 _One of the blessed Order is a looter_ , Pansy realises, with no small amout of smugness.

 

She darts around the door and gets him square in the back with a _petrificus totalus_.

 

He falls forward, smacking his forehead hard against the lip of the cabinet, and probably breaks his nose against the flagstone floor.

 

Belatedly, she remembers that she’s supposed to be dead, so she conjures her sleeping mask into an actual mask before she binds him with an _incarcerus_ , just to be safe, and flips him over.

 

His face is frozen into a grimace, but she sees his pupils dilate once she lifts the witchlight.

 

It hits her then, how she must look in her dark robes, her long hair unbound, and a black satin mask obscuring everything but her eyes.

 

The looter’s blood leaks down his nose, soaking into the collar of his cloak.

 

She knocks him out with a stunner and calls McGonagall.

 

.

.

.

 

It turns out that the looter’s name is _Mundungus Fletcher_. Thankfully, the irreverent, pink-haired auror who comes with McGonagall removes him from the house for questioning (because Pansy needs to _stay dead_ , and it would be unwise to interrogate a _thief_ in her proximity).

 

Free of the mask and stuck with McGonagall as a babysitter for now, Pansy upends the backpack holding all of Dung’s pilfered goods.

 

A locket, tarnished and truly, _truly_ ugly, chips a divot into the wooden prep table as it lands.

 

There is something unsettling in the way the emeralds set into the silver swallow the cheery yellow kitchen light.

 

Pansy’s survival instincts have never steered her wrong, and something tells her that she does _not_ want to pick it up.

 

She insists that McGonagall call Granger right there and then (she _might_ have said something about how _Dumbledore said to do it!_ even though he’s actually never spoken to Pansy in his life, RIP) and kicks up enough of a fuss that Granger apparates, with morning breath and bed hair, into Grimmauld Place, ready to start shrieking about whether Pansy is out of her _goddamn selfish Slytherin mind_.

 

She stops short upon seeing the locket, mouth a round _o_ of disbelief. Pansy has never felt so vindicated in her entire life.

 

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.

 

They relocate her living quarters to a tiny studio flat in Muggle London, then sit her down in front of Alastor Moody.

 

He harrumphs, then subjects her to wash after wash of anti-concealment spells before throwing her into a broom closet, locking and warding the door, and flooding it with icy water.

 

Pansy, as previously established, is an _ace_ at warding spells. She unravels the last layer just as she takes her last gulp of air, and blasts the door out for the fun of it.

 

Moody’s already got his shields up, so the splinters and the ensuing mini-tsunami don’t even touch him, but she knows that she made an _impression_.

 

He assigns the pink-haired Auror – _Tonks?_ – to be her tutor in defensive and offensive spellwork, advanced lockpicking, codebreaking, and the like.  

 

Pansy _loathes_ the woman – fucking _potato ‘Puff_ – but picks up all the important bits anyways. This is how she survives.

 

This is how she will thrive.

 

.

.

.

 

Her first actual mission is a fact-finding operation.

 

They send Tonks along with her, and Pansy casts all the quietfoot and soft air charms for the both of them as they break into the London office of Greengrass & Greengrass.

 

Tonks takes care of the actual espionage for now, carefully picking through the client files in the _Private and Special Clients_ team – in other words, _fucking wealthy criminals_ – while Pansy keeps watch.

 

It’s not like Pansy _knows_ what security was like in the years before the Dark Lord’s return, but she gets the impression that it’s been beefed up. Substantially.

 

There are two security wizards patrolling the three floors of Greengrass & Greengrass, and they aren’t being lazy about it, either. During one of their recon trips, Pansy had observed that a patrol of each floor takes fifteen to twenty minutes, because each guard does a grid sweep of _everything_ – the offices, the bullpen, the storage closets and the break rooms. The building is warded against disillusionment, and there are sprinkler systems that can be triggered to cast the _thief’s downfall_ onto any intruders.

 

Tonks needs to go through at least twenty-six years of files, photographing client information. It’s a three-hour process, _optimistically_ , which means that she needs to evade the guards in the room at least twelve times.

 

 _Suspicious, isn’t it_? Moody had grunted, almost affably. _What could these lawyers possibly be hiding_?

 

It was Tonks who’d thought of the solution, which Pansy had grudgingly admitted was _inspired,_  to say the least.

 

There is a desk and a swivel chair in the archive room, for people to review the information they’ve pulled. Pansy’s job is to wheel the chair out and stash it somewhere, keep an eye out for the security wizard, and then signal to Tonks when she has to put the file she’s copying down and then transfigure herself into another swivel chair.

 

Tonks has turned her hair black for the occasion, so that her swivel chair wouldn’t be bubblegum pink. Pansy doesn’t like how it makes her look, but she keeps that to herself and doesn’t think too hard about why she cares.

 

She can hear her heart pounding in her ears the entire time as she slides, masked, from cubicle to cubicle, tapping on the galleon she’s got burning a hole into her pocket to inform Tonks when she’s got five minutes to tidy the archive room before the security wizard comes in.

 

It’s her first mission. It’s boring. It’s terrifying. Pansy’s beyond frightened and incredibly calm, because she is not allowed to panic.

 

They’re done just shy of four hours after they start the mission clock without any incident. Tonks nudges Pansy’s shoulder in solidarity, and they both prepare to apparate back to Moody to be debriefed.

 

This is going to be her role, Pansy knows. Eventually, Tonks will go back to her own solo missions, and Pansy will be the Order’s newest asset in the shadows.

 

The war will continue, and there will be work that is not this bloodless, or this easy, but will be equally – if not more – necessary. When she returns to her muggle flat, she opens all the windows and sits in her kitchen with a mug of tea, listening to the sound of cars and people and life moving forwards. She listens for what peace sounds like, and tries to commit it to memory.  

 

.

.

.

 

Moody doesn’t die in the Battle of the Seven Potters ( _Merlin_ , one is insufferable enough, thank you).

 

He doesn’t die, but he _is_ critically injured, and he lost his eye somewhere above Surrey.

 

The mediwitches place him in a coma, and leave him at Arabella Figg’s to convalesce. Shacklebolt takes over as head of the Order’s intelligence operations.

 

Shacklebolt, who is low on resources, splits Pansy from Tonks earlier than she’s comfortable with, but also draws up a sort of training programme for her to follow to develop her skills without an actual mentor shadowing her every move.

 

Pansy welcomes it, because then she doesn’t have to _deal_ with people.

 

Pansy hates it, because she hadn’t realised how much she missed speech until she could go weeks without saying a word out loud to anyone else.

 

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.

 

On the night the ministry falls, Pansy’s Polyjuiced as a cleaning lady and is just done with her recon mission of memorising the floor plan of the misuse of muggle artefacts office (not like she learned very much, but she’s pretty sure that a fellytone would be extremely useful in a world where all the floos are policed – which they _will be_ ).

 

The lights flicker, the floos in the central lobby flare to life, and men turned into monsters with masks step from the flames.

 

Pansy flattens herself against the wall immediately as the screaming starts.

 

Nobody pays her any mind, because no one pays the help any mind, but she sees the Aurors flooding in – and the Death Eaters mowing down anyone who even so much as _draws_ their wand.

 

One grabs a young woman by her hair, falling out of its knot, and throws her into a floo, shouting a destination.

 

She disappears, and one of his compatriots claps him on the back.

 

Pansy fights the urge to vomit, and crabs along the side of the lobby towards the floos – if they’re taking hostages – _playthings_ – then the floos are still open.

 

For now.

 

A hand clamps down on the upper arm of Pansy’s borrowed form, and she lets herself slide into character and _scream_.

 

She keeps her eyes averted, sobbing, blubbering, wailing, and basically shaking enough of her greying hair loose from its half-hearted knot at the base of her skull to cover her face.

 

And then she sees them – silver buckles, engraved with thorny vines and polished to a shine – on her captor’s shoes.

 

Pansy doesn’t stop screaming, but now her skin is pebbling into goosebumps under her skin, and there’s a frantic, hysterical edge to her that hadn’t been there before. Pansy knows, objectively, that she needs to _keep her head_ , and there’s no way that her father knows who she is like this, but – she is _frightened_. A blob of mucus lands on her attacker’s cloak, and Pansy is thrust away with a huff of disgust.

 

She doesn’t look back before scrambling towards the nearest fireplace and flooing towards the Leaky Cauldron.

 

It’s chaos in the pub – what with someone screaming about bloody murder happening at the Ministry at this moment (they’re not wrong, there), and how Voldemort’s got an army of giants ripping holes through each floor (which is a little off the mark).

 

Pansy slips into the women’s bathroom, throws up everything in her stomach until she’s spitting saliva into the bowl, Polyjuices herself as a nondescript, brunette university student she’d bumped into that morning on the tube, and disappears into Muggle London.

 

.

.

.

 

She doesn’t hear from anyone for three days.

 

She wears her own face around her flat – one of the reasons why Moody had set her up here was so that the Muggles wouldn’t know that her real face was supposed to be reduced to so much ash and bone in a Hogwarts classroom.

 

She does her laundry the Muggle way, but with Aguamenti fed through the hose, because this apartment is not hooked up to any electricity or power (both things that Tonks had to teach her about).

 

Eventually, she gets bored enough to turn on the television – a Muggle appliance that Tonks had _insisted_ she have, because _all Muggles have them, and what better way to educate herself about fitting into the Muggle world than watching telly?_

 

She watches Coronation Street, re-runs of the ER on daytime television, and Neighbours. She doesn’t mispronounce _Telephone_ and knows what a microwave is supposed to do.

 

She considers what Muggles wear for _fashion_ , and thinks about whether she can ask the Order where they get their galleons changed into Muggle money – which she really needs, because it’s ridiculous of her to be running out of food when there is a Muggle grocery store downstairs.

 

She heats up another can of beans, and toasts her bread directly on the oven grates.

 

Three days pass, and then Kingsley sends his patronus to tell her that the Ministry has fallen.

 

As if it was news.

 

Pansy hasn’t yet managed to produce a corporeal patronus, so she can’t exactly send a response. She just waves the thing into silver smoke, and reheats another can of beans.

 

Someone will come knocking with an assignment. It will likely be sooner rather than later.

 

.

.

.

 

Her training wheels are off.

 

Her new handler is Lupin, whose job is to oversee all the individual agents in the field. She doesn’t know what Tonks does now, but she’s apparently in a command position herself.

 

Pansy doesn’t meet other members of the Order. The fewer people know about her, the better.

 

Draco may be their double agent, but Pansy – Pansy is their _spy_. All her operations are covert, and she is never seen, rarely hit, and mostly successful. Lupin stresses that her cover is the most important thing, and that if a mission is going south, she is to _pull out_ rather than compromise it.

 

It’s their leverage.

 

She keeps a running tally of her mission success rate. Not to go into details, but she’s efficient, effective, and _useful_.

 

Pansy becomes a spectre, slipping through offices and manor houses where she used to play tag.

 

Pansy becomes the Order’s ghost.

 

.

.

.

 

She makes her first kill about three months after the fall of the Ministry.

 

She’d let her guard down while exploring a shipment of munitions that their intel had informed them that the Death Eaters would be receiving from France. One minute, she is sliding along the sides of the containers at the docks, and the next, she is wand to wand with a security wizard.

 

It could hardly be called a scuffle – the security wizard tackles her to the ground and in the process, dislodges her mask, exposing her face.

 

Pansy _panics_.

 

She jabs her wand into his back and _cuts._

 

It’s blunt, messy, and _Muggle_ , but he slides off her, limp.

 

There is blood _everywhere_.

 

It had been Moody who had taught her this next part of her skillset.

 

She scourgifies it all, breathing heavily through her mouth, transfigures him into a bone and pockets it – _Barty Jr. had the right of it – transfiguring organic matter into organic matter is less taxing on your magic_ – and cleans herself up.

 

She proceeds with the mission as required, sabotages a rough twenty percent of the found munitions, and leaves a subtle tracing spell on the rest of them. Then she apparates down to under Tamesis Dock, where she strips the dead man naked, scourgifies him entirely, and floats him into the black, brackish water. She transfigures his soiled clothes into a plastic bottle and chucks it in the trash.

 

He’ll turn up as a murder victim for the Muggle police in a few weeks, but Pansy will be thankful for the rest of her life if the new Ministry Aurors never get wind of it.

 

She goes home, sheds everything she’s wearing right there in her living room, and vanishes all of it.

 

She sits in the bath until the water is icy, and stays in there until dawn breaks.

 

She takes it as her penance.

 

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.

.

 

On the morning of her first Christmas Eve at her flat, they bring her a surprise. Daphne, Tracey and Astoria burst through the door, accompanied by a very harried looking Lupin, who settles them in, says he’ll be back in five hours, and then sods off.

 

Astoria and Daphne are back at Hogwarts this year, providing intel to the remaining DA and hiding first years from the Carrows.

 

Tracey has joined up with the Order – so have Kinjal Bhatia, Yatin Bhagat, Adelaide Murton, Adrian Pucey and Terence Higgs. They’ve all been organised into strike teams, acting on the intelligence and tips provided by assets like Pansy and Draco. They haven’t lost anyone yet, Tracey notes, but Chang stepped on a mine during one of their first dispatch missions to Death Eater targets. She’s been pulled from active duty while she re-learns how to walk with a prosthetic.

 

Daphne’s brought food that she doesn’t know how to cook with her, so Tracey gamely steps up and tries her hand at recreating Christmas at her Muggle grandparents’ home in Cheshire.

 

Daphne doesn’t bring up Warrington once, but Pansy does catch her looking a little pensively into the fire after the plates have been cleared and they’re all stretched out in front of the telly, which appears to be broadcasting a film about an implausibly rugged man who is also terrified of snakes who spends a great deal of time stomping around steaming jungles.

 

Pansy plonks her arm around Daphne’s narrow shoulders and lets her lean her weight against her for a bit. Astoria snuggles up closer to her sister on her other side, and Tracey, who’s sprawled out on the rug, rests her cheek against Daphne’s knee.

 

Onscreen, the villain makes a jibe at Americans. Pansy is warm, her flat has _people in it_ , and the war has retreated into tomorrow’s problem.

 

This is what peace feels like, she thinks. This is what all of this is for.

 

.

.

.

 

On New Years’ morning, she’s got the BBC on while she pores through Tonks’ old notes from her Auror Academy days.

 

Her hands pause in the act of flipping a page when the telly flashes to a street in flames – _gas leak, catastrophic_ – and the newsreader lists the names of the dead: Jacob Johnson. Robert Kincaidy. Penelope Clearwater.

 

Pansy shuts the telly off, and continues working.

 

.

.

.

 

The war drags on. She kills again – a low-level fighter on a security detail at Mulciber Hall – and throws up into the gutter outside her flat, after.

 

.

.

.

 

One day, one of the numerous mission portkeys she’s got laid out on her breakfast table starts rattling, and she prepares for what she assumes is a smash and dash rescue (Lupin’s thrown her into a couple of those before – it’s all really been quite fly-by-night, but she hasn't really got a choice in choosing when to confront danger).

 

Instead, the portkey dumps her in a safehouse in Wiltshire, far away enough from Malfoy Manor for concealment and fidelius charms to take root, but close enough for Draco Malfoy to spirit the occasional captive to, if the opportunity arises. Malfoy doesn’t trust anyone else with access to this safehouse, and so they’ve rigged it so that if he activates one portkey, her corresponding portkey will, as well.

 

From what she understands, he’s never managed to break anybody loose before.

 

Of course, he chooses to save _her_.

 

Hermione Granger is alone, unconscious, and emptying a frankly _shocking_ amount of blood onto the polished wooden floors.

 

Pansy’s useless at healing spells herself – her options are _don’t get caught_ or _die before cover is blown_ – so she drops to her knees beside Granger and fishes in her utility kit for a portkey – any portkey – marked with the lime green paint that indicates a healer-in-residence.

 

Then she anchors herself to Granger – who is already a lot colder than she should be – and prays to everything that she doesn’t believe in that she isn’t too late.

 

.

.

.

 

They’re deposited in a safehouse in Devon that appears to house at least _some_ of the Weasleys. Fred Weasley comes tearing out of the kitchen upon their arrival, and swears enough to give a hippogriff a heart attack when he sees the state of Granger.

 

He screams at one of his brothers – _dragon brother_ – to _get your arse out here right bloody now_.

 

Pansy leans against the wall, swaying under Granger’s dead weight. Fred’s already there, gently extricating Granger from her, and he and his brother spirit her into another room before slamming the door behind them shut.

 

Pansy sinks down onto the tiled floor of the hallway, smeared with what is likely half of Granger’s blood volume, closes her eyes, and waits.

 

.

.

.

 

She must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knows, she’s being shaken awake, very gently.

 

She opens her eyes to see Lupin crouched before her, harried and exhausted.

 

“We both need tea,” she says, and he agrees, helping her up and herding her into the kitchen.

 

“In case you were wondering, both Harry and Ron are with Bill Weasley, and they’re alive. We’ll be sending both of them over here as soon as they’re able to move, because Hermione isn’t going to be up any time soon.” He takes down a pair of mugs from a cupboard while she scrubs dried blood from her hands. “She’s going to be alright, by the way. I checked on her before waking you up. You likely saved her life.”

 

Pansy sniffs, and puts the kettle on. There is a swooping, clawing lightness in her chest, and she refuses to identify it as relief.

 

Lupin gives her a moment, and then begins again.

 

“Harry says he knows how to bring the war to a close, soon,” he says, and Pansy damn near burns herself bringing the kettle to a boil with her wand.

 

“He _what_?”

 

“He says he needs to break into Gringotts – into the Lestrange vault – and get something. Once he destroys it, we’ll be that much closer to weakening You-Know-Who.”

 

Pansy, who has spent the past year gathering intelligence about the shape of the Dark Lord’s organisation, _thunks_ the sugar jar in front of Lupin with a little more force than necessary. “Do you know how many he’s managed to recruit to his cause? Cut his head off, and you remove leadership, but he’s got _lieutenants ready to take over_. Right now, we have _one_ enemy – kill the Dark Lord, and you’ll create _many_.”

 

Lupin chucks a teabag into each mug and takes the kettle from her before she upends it all over him. “It might be easier to take people down in the chaos.”

 

“We don’t have enough numbers. We aren’t trained well enough to take on his army – and he has an _actual army_. Weaken the Dark Lord where we can, but don’t alert him to it. We need _time_ to whittle his fighters down.”

 

“Dragging the war on will give him time to recruit.”

 

“Recruit more _trainees_ , while we have a chance to kill off the commanders and the veterans. Pitching a final battle now is nothing more than self-destruction. Also, who’s to say _we_ can’t recruit, either?”

 

Lupin is silent, mulling it all over. He’ll need to speak to Shacklebolt, but she knows that she’s gotten him to think about it. People tend to lose their heads with Potter – she can’t deny that he’s very charismatic, and has a kind of grimly optimistic quality about him that tends to infect the people around him, but he’s not exactly a strategic player.

 

“Tell Potter that you know where to find me if you need help with any espionage,” she says. “Draco isn’t going anywhere without Granger, as we all know, and Potter and Weasley are damn near pointless without her.”

 

Lupin drains his mug and nods at her before standing to leave.

 

He hesitates at the door, and she crosses her arms, back stiff, waiting. Mulish.

 

The moment passes, and he simply smiles at her, like the sun barely cresting the horizon after a stormy night, and disapparates at the doorstep.

 

.

.

.

 

They throw her at Potter a week after that, portkeying her back into the living room of dragon brother’s safehouse.

 

Predictably, they get into a shouting match about six minutes in.

 

At the end of it, she reckons she wins, because Weasley takes her point that it’s _stupid_ to break into Gringotts _now_ that everyone is on high alert, and Potter, while in principle is not averse to barging in there alone, isn’t _that stupid_.

 

“They’ll _move_ it,” Potter shrieks, and she throws her hands up in the air.

 

“Then they’ll move it! Have you ever considered the possibility that it may be easier to nick things _in transit_?”

 

Draco materialises at the top of the stairs leading to the bedrooms, incensed. “Have your little lover’s spat _elsewhere_ , before I avada you _myself_!”

 

Pansy raises her eyebrows. Draco is still in deep with the Death Eaters, so she assumes that his little visit here is on the sly, very brief, and extremely dangerous. _Of course_ he’d risk blowing his cover for Granger. The idiot.

 

Weasley rolls his eyes as Draco storms back into a room, presumably Granger’s.

 

“We still have to collect the other thing,” he reminds Potter. “Let’s just get that one first.”

 

Potter looks like he’s about to have a seizure, but he exhales, heavy and long, and nods. “Right. Ok.”

 

Pansy fingers her portkey back to London in her pocket. “You know where to find me if you need me,” she says, even though it might actually kill Potter to admit that there is a possibility that he would require her assistance in any way.

 

Weasley waves at her, expression congenial, while Potter flaps his hand at her, resigned. She shrugs, and portkeys away.

 

.

.

.

 

A memory:

 

It is their eighth DA session on patronuses and Pansy has yet to produce anything. Even Granger has managed to produce a couple of silvery wisps two hours ago. Daphne’s peregrine falcon has been playing at hunting with Astoria’s one for the past three meetings, swooping in and out and darting just out of the reach of excited, grasping fourth-years. Ron Weasley’s terrier has been terrorising Luna Lovegood’s hare, and Potter’s stag has been bounding around - showing off, probably - while he patiently makes his way down the line, correcting pronunciation and reminding people to _think happy thoughts_.

 

She’s fully frustrated by the time Potter reaches her, and she finally cracks when he frowns and snaps: “surely your memories of terrorising first-years should be adequate enough for you to produce at least some light?”

 

She flips him off and simultaneously sends a knee-reversal hex his way. She isn’t even trying - it goes straight between his legs - but suddenly the patronuses gambolling about the room are gone and every wand in the space is pointed towards Pansy with varying degrees of steadiness. Astoria grabs Daphne’s hand, fingers sticky and twitchy, and Pansy is reminded that despite the fact that the list that Granger has taped up on the wall doesn’t state their houses beside their names, _Slytherin_ will always be a dividing tattoo on their arms.

 

“I’m not doing this,” she breathes, cheeks flushed and eyes dark. “I don’t need a fucking patronus to ward a Dementor off when I can use the killing curse and fucking mean it.”

 

Potter’s got his wand out in Pansy’s face, and from the corner of her eye, she sees Daphne move to knock it from his hand, Chosen One or not. Astoria pulls her back, too frightened, too uncertain in this new space to dare to face off with the natives. “You won’t be able to cast anything if you can’t fend them off. They’ll get into your head.”

 

“Not all of us pass out when we’re within two kilometres of a Dementor, Potter,” she sneers, and thanks the stars that her voice doesn’t wobble when she says it.  

 

Potter’s expression twists. “Yeah, well, try being barely a year old and hearing your mother screaming as Voldemort _avadas_ her right in front of you, Parkinson. Why don’t you try having your parents’ murder replaying over and over again and not being overwhelmed by the sheer horror of it?”

 

This is a nightmare that she has never had to imagine, but we all have our own monsters.

 

Later, she’ll chalk it up to the blood pounding in her ears, the shake of her bones in her body, and the desperate need to have someone _understand_ that has her explaining: “I’m ten years old and I wake to my father’s hand closing around my wrist. Nobody screams.”

 

She has never told anyone this before.

 

Daphne and Astoria are frozen and thunderstruck, a million little events slotting into place in their shared memories. All those pieces of a childhood – Pansy insisting on playdates extending into sleepovers every single time, Pansy being the _best_ at hide and seek, Pansy refusing to be touched unless she reached out first.

 

Potter blinks, momentarily confused, while Granger – Granger’s face _crumples_ , and Ginny Weasley steps forward to wrap her arms around Pansy, gingerly, warily.

 

Ginny doesn’t _quite_ burst into tears, but she does hold her cheek to Pansy’s, and whispers: _you are safe here_.

 

Pansy doesn’t hug back, but she thinks that this is the moment where the fist of ice she keeps held tight in her chest begins to thaw.

 

.

.

.

 

Ginny turns up at her flat on a muggy summer day, freshly graduated from the hell that Hogwarts is calling _school_ , with a whole set of new scars to show for it.

 

Pansy takes one look at her and drags her outside, down to the Muggle gelateria across the street, for some pistachio gelato and sunshine.

 

She still polyjuices herself every single time she heads out, and she insists that Ginny does, as well. Ginny laughs, and calls her paranoid, but she takes the Polyjuice without complaint.

 

When they’ve got cups of gelato safely in hand and are seated outside, backs safely against the wall, Ginny asks if Pansy’s heard from Daphne, recently.

 

Pansy hasn’t, because Lupin is _even more_ paranoid than she is, and refuses to tell her about what the rest of the Order is up to in case she gets captured and tortured for information.

 

Which, considering her role in all of this, is quite likely.

 

Ginny purses her lips, and leans in. “You didn’t hear it from me, but she’s joined a sort of research division of the Order with Fred and George – I understand that she’s focusing on the potioneering side of things. Hopefully they’ll find us a better solution than having you Polyjuice yourself every single time you want to head out for fresh air.”

 

Pansy nods, thankful for even that little bit of information, and Ginny grins and smacks the baseball cap she’d been wearing onto Pansy’s head. “All you have to do is look a little bit different, is all. Change up your fashion. Lean into your muggle style.”

 

When she leaves, she leaves Pansy a treasure trove of shield cloaks, Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder, trick wands and decoy detonators – ostensibly her _real_ reason for coming.

 

Pansy curls up on her threadbare couch and thinks about looking just a _little_ bit different.

 

Then she gets out the Muggle phone book.

 

.

.

.

 

She waits until she has some downtime after a mission, and then confounds a muggle plastic surgeon in one of the private Muggle hospitals on a Saturday afternoon into giving her a rhinoplasty.

 

She’s never liked her nose, anyways.

 

She dyes her hair dark and cuts it short – she tells the hairdresser to look at _Demi Moore in Ghost_ as a reference – and studies herself in the mirror.

 

She knows what she looked like, in school. Daphne was the pretty one – golden haired and blue-eyed, the perfect pureblood heiress. Pansy was the girl who was incongruous with her name: hard-nosed, hard-eyed, hard-faced.

 

Her eyes are still grey and flinty – they’re her mother’s eyes, inherited from the Blacks a couple of generations back. There are bruises under them – remnants from the Muggle surgery – but they’ll go. Eventually. Her nose is new and delicate and lifts the angular planes of her face, and she _likes_ it. She likes that she can choose which of herself to keep, in this life. She likes that she can choose what to make of herself.

 

She almost looks attractive, if she were into saying things like that aloud, but all she needs to survive here is to look different.

 

She doesn’t look like Pansy Parkinson, anymore. She certainly isn’t the same person. She hasn’t been Pansy Parkinson in years.

 

.

.

.

 

Lupin actually jumps the next time he sees her for a mission briefing.

 

Pansy patiently cooperates with the entire run of verification questions, then informs him about her nose job.

 

He laughs, and says that he’ll have to tell Tonks about this.

 

She hasn’t thought about her former mentor in what feels like a long time – Lupin tells her that she’s just given birth, and has been taken off active duty for a while.

 

It’s a shame, Pansy thinks, privately. Tonks was one of the best they had.

 

Then, Lupin starts the briefing, and Pansy slides back into work.

 

.

.

.

 

It’s close to Christmas when Pansy breaks into a Death Eater laboratory in Manchester and is immediately felled by the sucking pull of a torment of dementors.

 

 _This is it_ , she thinks distantly, the wood of her wand cold and clammy and useless, rolling between her fingers and the floor, her left cheek pressed against the grouting of the tiled floor. She feels her clothes tearing against her skin, and sweaty hands winding through her hair. There is so much terror. There is so much _filth._

_Should have listened to Potter about the patronus. Daphne will kill me herself when she finds out_.

 

Pansy blinks.

 

Daphne.

 

Astoria.

 

Tracey.

 

_The silence is deafening. The night will never end._

 

Pansy heaves herself up onto her elbows.

 

Last Christmas, she sat in front of a fire with her best friends. Last Christmas, she was with family she _chose_.

 

_Lipsy’s hands close gently over her own, taking the loofah from her. She’s already scraped herself raw._

 

She raises her wand.

 

_Expecto Patronum._

 

It’s but a mere wisp of light, but it’s something. Pansy struggles to her knees. Tracey was teaching her how to properly butterfly a chicken the muggle way, waving kitchen shears about like a wand and blubbering nonsense words. 

 

_Expecto Patronum._

 

It’s an orb, now, and Pansy holds it steady as she clutches at the door frame and claws her way back upright. Daphne, Draco, Tracey, and Astoria were _all_ there for her on days where _Pansy_ was nothing more than a noun for a plant, cut and drowned in tepid water.

 

She holds on to her memories of joy, and tries again.

 

 _Expecto Patronum_!

 

A bear, huge and silver and raging, erupts into being before her, and wrestles the darkness back.

 

The dementors shrink and cower. Pansy steps out of the doorway to allow them to flee.

 

In the sudden quiet, her patronus lands back on all fours and looks around at her, waiting.

 

Pansy reaches out, trembling. The moment feels sacred, but just before she can touch the tip of her index finger to its nose, the bear bows its head and dissipates into silver smoke.

 

She gives herself a breath more, then lifts her head, shakes herself, and raises her wand.

 

 _Lumos_.

 

Why would Death Eaters be keeping dementors in underground laboratories?

 

Pansy finds the light switches, and palms them all on.

 

She’d thought the dementors had been the worst of it.

 

For the first time _ever_ , Pansy activates the distress beacon on her Order token for backup.

 

.

.

.

 

Pansy is beyond rage, at this point. Pansy is petrified, and shrill, and _livid_.

 

“- Cages and cages and _cages_ of prisoners, all lined up against the wall like a bloody _zoo_ – were you _ever_ going to tell me that Tracey had been captured, what the _fuck-_ ”

 

Lupin has his head in his hands and his eyes on the instant photographs they’d taken of the laboratory, cages mercifully empty. “You know why I didn’t tell you about Ms. Davies, Pansy. We’re lucky you got to her when you did – she’s just this side of sane, and has a fighting chance at a full recovery.”

 

Pansy can feel sludge, black and ugly, rising up her throat. The image of Tracey, emaciated and grey and curled up in a nest of hay on the floor of a metal cage, will be seared into the back of her retinas forever. “There is _nothing lucky_ about this,” she hisses. “What were they _doing_?”

 

Lupin rifles about his desk for the inventory of items that the strike team had taken from the laboratory. “Nobody knows, yet, but it looks like they were experimenting. They were testing some sort of hallucinogenic weapon based off a Dementor’s effect on _both_ Muggles _and_ wizards.”

 

Pansy closes her eyes, and tries to breathe through her nose. Nausea sweeps through her, heady and thin. “If I’d just agreed with you and Potter about the war ending in June-”

 

He doesn’t respond – just opens a couple more drawers at his desk. Pansy scrunches her face up, and _wills_ herself not to cry.

 

It doesn’t work.

 

Her eyes are startled open when she feels him press a square of cardboard into her palm, and it feels like all the floodgates have opened.

 

Pansy drops into a metal folding chair and _weeps_ , clutching a piece of chocolate that Lupin’s managed to scrounge up from somewhere.

 

He sits back down behind his desk and waits, patiently, for her breathing to even out.

 

“Chocolate is not going to _fix_ anything,” she means to spit _vehemently_ , but it comes out all wet and pleading. She doesn’t think she’s cried so hard since Cassius died.

 

Merlin, Daphne. Someone’s going to have to tell Daphne.

 

Lupin conjures a handkerchief and hands it over to her. She blows her nose, _hard_ , and scrubs defiantly at her cheeks before meeting his gaze. “We need to _win_ ,” she says. He sighs, and now it’s his turn to run a hand over his face.

 

“We’re sending you out to Yorkshire, tomorrow. Goyle Senior has returned to his estate for Yuletide.”

 

It’s like there are metal bars slowly winding their way around her chest, snaking under her ribs.

 

Lupin’s expression slides into something bleaker. “It’s time to start whittling.”

 

There is a war to be won. She volunteered for this – she signed up for it – she _knew_ she would have to do this.

 

Pansy straightens her spine and squares her shoulders. “It will be done.”

 

She stands to leave, and Lupin walks her to the door. She doesn’t look back at him – not once – but she catches a glimpse of his face in the mirrored glass in the hallway.

 

He does not expect to be forgiven for asking this of her.

 

.

.

.

 

Pansy is not on an Order Strike Team – she’s meant to be _invisible,_ which means that to date, when she has killed for the Order, it has only ever been as a last resort. She is not to leave any trace of her presence after she has gone – and that involves bodies.

 

Before she breaks into the wards at Gargoyle Peak, she closes her eyes and quietly pulls a shutter down around her emotions. The Order needs soldiers. Soldiers are not always given the luxury of holding on to their humanity.

 

When her heart is a pool of still, clear water, Pansy raises her wand and begins the mission.

 

.

.

.

 

No matter the man that Goyle Senior is, whenever he is home, he visits his father’s grave at sundown each evening.

 

Pansy knows this.

 

When he kneels on the stone step before the (admittedly ostentatious) gravestone, Pansy, nestled comfortably in a tree above him, shoots a locking spell at his throat.

 

It takes him three minutes to die.

 

Pansy watches, trying to be impassive, as he claws uselessly at his neck, scratching ribbons of blood down the column of his throat.

 

At the end of it, he slumps, broken, into the earth above his father’s bones.

 

When a homenum revelio reveals no other person in the vicinity, Pansy lifts the spell and leaves.

 

She does not touch his body, and reworks the patch of the wards which she’d unwoven to get in.

 

.

.

.

 

When she gets home, she sits as close to the fire as she can handle, and sobs until there is nothing left for her to feel.

 

She does not consider begging for forgiveness. There is no one she would ask.

 

.

.

.

 

Pansy isn’t the type who’d start a _Wall of Crazy_ , but she begins double checking every piece of intelligence she collects for the Order, trying desperately to figure out what kind of madman would keep a nest of Dementors in the basement of a warehouse.

At least, she tries. Lupin doesn’t assign her any missions for weeks after Goyle’s assassination, leaving her to her own devices. She does a deep clean of her apartment, finally learns how to make steak the Muggle way, and figures out how to butterfly a chicken on her own.

 

Just like how Tracey showed her.

 

She isn’t allowed to visit Tracey, because Tracey’s currently in a safehouse kept by people who don’t know that she’s alive. Daphne sends her updates when she can via Lupin, and it all makes Pansy so _angry_ that she shatters a mug against the wall, picks up one of the larger shards of ceramic, and throws that, as well.

 

_She’s awake, and seems to be aware of her surroundings, but refuses to speak._

Pansy remembers Tracey singing in the bathroom, once, her voice clear and laughing. _Where is the shepherd for this lost lamb?_ Pansy hears Tracey in the soundtrack of every quiet muggle café on sunlit afternoons.

 

_She was screaming for her mother, last night, but there’s no way we can bring her in. It was such a nasty divorce that she became a pureblood supremacist. Her muggle father lives in Hong Kong with his new muggle family._

Hermione Granger had apparently obliviated her own parents. Tracey didn’t even tell her father about the war. She’d pre-written stacks of generic, run of the mill correspondence, and hired a random ex-primary school classmate to send them to him on her behalf before disappearing into the Order.

 

Pansy wonders what it’s like, to love someone that much.

_She won’t get out of bed, not even to wash. She barely eats anything, and looks right past us when we’re there._

When Warrington passed away, Daphne would finish doing one thing, then sit, exhausted, and would continue sitting there unless she was chivvied on to her next task. Pansy and Tracey had taken turns in walking her through her day, making sure that she was never, _ever_ alone. Pansy knows that Daphne is with Tracey now, but part of her rails at how _she_ isn’t allowed to be there. She isn’t allowed to share this burden.

_Terence came to visit, and drew the curtains back. She started screaming and hurled a pitcher at him. She missed and hit Chang in her prosthetic leg, instead. There’s a divot in it now, but Chang refuses to get it fixed. Says it shows character._

Tracey always did have a shit throwing arm.

_She won’t talk to me, Pans. She knows who I am – I can_ see _it – but she just looks right past me. It’s been over two months; I know the road is long, and there’s time yet, but they_ broke _her. We’re all not the same people that we were before all of this, but Tracey – our Tracey may never come back._

 

Pansy knows about not _coming back_ – she literally pretended to _die_ – but what Tracey survived is a trauma that she is _still_ battling. The war isn’t over. Tracey isn’t safe. None of them are.

 

Tracey isn’t allowed anywhere near a wand. No one is allowed to speak of the war around her. They can’t afford the manpower to post a guard at her door, but her room is warded and locked from the outside.

 

Her mind is still too fractured for the Order to verify her identify.

 

The war has taken too much from them, already. But – most of all, Pansy resents that the war has left a dark film over people whom other people trust.

 

Friends and family mean little in the face of Polyjuice and double agents.

 

Civil war is anything but.

 

.

.

.

 

After a mission debrief, Lupin hands her a pewter bottle holding a litre of the new and improved Polyjuice Potion that Daphne’s brewed up – it extends the hold of a disguise to three hours and twenty-six minutes, and it’s nothing short of brilliant.

 

“She insisted on this project for you,” Lupin tells her, mildly. “I know that after you got your nose done, you stopped Polyjuicing yourself behind your mask when you’re on stealth missions, but she wanted you to be safer when you’re on infiltration jobs.”

 

Pansy blinks away a film of tears, and clutches the absurdly heavy bottle to her chest.

 

.

.

.

 

She begins racking up a body count.

 

On Valentine’s Day, she steals Yaxley’s mistress’s wand as the woman slumbers, drugged, and assassinates both Yaxley and his wife with it as they sit down to dinner. Pansy then ups the dosage of the dreamless sleep intravenously, and stays with the mistress until her heart stops.

 

Once the weather warms up, she spooks Nott Senior’s Aethonian mare when he’s out for his afternoon ride. Nott tries to hang on – he makes a valiant effort at it – but she hits his stirrups with a slipping charm and he’s thrown to the muddy ground.

 

She snaps his neck with a severing charm on impact.

 

Agatha Pyrites is found by her house elves in the morning, dead from choking on her own vomit after mistakenly adding needlethread mushrooms to her clearskin draught instead of snowstalk fungus.

 

Lupin spaces the missions out, so it doesn’t look like high ranking death eaters are suddenly and inexplicably fatally clumsy, but those remaining beef up their security around June, anyways. Pansy can’t blame them. They’re fanatics, not stupid.

 

Still, no one is guarded against a girl who doesn’t exist.

 

Pansy slides through wards designed to keep out anyone less than pureblooded, and draws on her knowledge of every dark hex she memorised while hiding from her father in the library as a child.

 

Thorfinn Rowle smashes his head in after falling over the edge of his estate’s lookout tower while inebriated.

 

Sisyphus Selwyn gets crushed by the tarnished old chandelier over his dining table while doing a spot of redecorating after having been incarcerated in Azkaban for over a decade.

 

Pansy is now the Order’s bogeyman.

 

.

.

.

 

 

As a small mercy, Lupin does not ask her to assassinate members of her own family. Technically, she’s kind of related to _just about_ every Death Eater, but he seems to be drawing the line at asking her to murder her father and her cousins Rosier.  

 

One morning, she wakes to find a single square of cardstock embossed with a bouquet of calla lilies slipped under her front door.

 

When she taps it with her wand, it blooms into being, all dewy and ghostly and tied neatly with a silver ribbon.

 

 _Forgive me_ , reads the accompanying card.

 

With shaking hands, Pansy stumbles over to the telly and turns on the news.

 

A great fire had swept through Islington the night before, melting car bodies and ripping up tarmac.

 

 _A fire._ That rips up _tarmac._

 

A camera pans across a bloodied street, and she sees a limp hand in the corner of the shot adorned with a silver signet ring. Roses. Rosier.

 

She had never been close to Laurent – he was eleven years older, _very_ grown up, _and_ kind of a huge prick – but he was the last of the Rosiers, just as she had been the last to carry her father’s name. The last to carry her family’s ring.  

 

Pansy stays in _all day_ and hops across all the major news channels, re-watching site footage until she is certain that Laurent Rosier is dead. From the way he had fallen, he had been hit from behind.

 

Nobody else knows that she likes calla lilies apart from Draco, because of that one time he’d presented her with a bunch of pansies and she’d hemmed and hawed and informed him that she was grateful but for future reference, she wanted calla lilies.

 

Draco is also not allowed to make contact with anyone in the Order apart from his handler – whom she suspects is Kingsley, because Snape is _also_ a spy and _cannot handle other spies_.

 

But – because Draco is _Draco_ , he would want her to have a chance to put a face to her cousin’s assassin. Even if it is his own. Especially if it is his own.

 

 _Forgive me_.

 

Pansy thinks about her aunt, who had lost her husband to the Dark Lord’s first war and her son to this one. Except – from her aunt’s perspective, her family had been murdered by the Order.

 

Truth be told, they _had_.

 

 _Forgive me_.

 

She transfigures a coffee mug into a vase.

 

.

.

.

 

On Hallowe’en, she almost gets caught breaking into the Averys’ dilapidated old abbey in rural Cumbria. She ends up knocking a house elf out pretty hard with a silver tea tray, and Avery himself gets a good slash in before she brings the ceiling down on him.

 

By the time Pansy manages to drag herself out of the rubble and cast a homenum revelio, her shirt is soaked through from a gash opening just under the tip of her right clavicle, reaching diagonally across her chest towards her heart.

 

The spell reveals nothing. Even the house elf is gone.

 

She fumbles in her utility belt for a medical portkey, and tries not to pass out at the smell of blood in her nostrils.

 

The portkey activates. Pansy doesn’t remember landing, but she does awake a while later with bandages wound around her chest, in an unfamiliar bed.

 

Parvati Patil pokes her head in when Pansy knocks an alarm clock over, trying to check if her wand is on her nightstand. It isn’t, of course, but instinct is instinct.

 

“You’re going to be fine, but that’ll scar,” Parvati says apologetically as she locks the door behind her and strides to the foot of the bed before levelling her wand at Pansy.

 

“Who was the first person you successfully disarmed in the DA?”

 

Even injured and in the middle of a war, Pansy smiles a little to herself and pats herself on the back for putting this down as one of her security questions. The memory of pompous little Ernie Macmillan tripping over himself trying to grab at his wand will always be a good one.

 

She runs a grimy hand through her hair and sits up.

 

Parvati’s grip on her wand tightens even as she keeps her expression placid. This is how they survive.

 

They slide into the verification dance that passes for _hello_ in war.

 

.

.

.

 

It turns out that she’s in the same safehouse that Tracey is in, and that Lupin has reworked assignments and security clearance so that Pansy can stay here for a while, with her friends, during Yule.

 

As soon as Parvati’s established that Pansy is actually Pansy, she raps on the door and lets herself out, leaving it open for Daphne to come barrelling in.

 

Pansy blinks, barks out a laugh, and demands – “What, did you get _lice_?”

 

Daphne scrunches up her nose ruefully, rubbing a hand over her buzz cut, brushing the raised cord of a scar stretching around the back of her left ear up to the crown of her skull. “Death Eaters surprised us when we were out on a supply run. They had to shave everything to heal this, and then I just got used to not emptying half a bottle of hair potion every time I washed my hair. Anyways – _you_ could drop He Who Must Not Be Named a note about new noses, since you’re not dead.”

 

Pansy grins, and lets Daphne help her into a fluffy pink bathrobe.

 

“I want my wand, and I want to see Trace.”

 

Daphne’s lips go tight, and she doesn’t quite flinch, but Pansy feels the twitch in her hands as she ties the sash snugly around her waist.

 

“We managed to get Snape in here for a couple of hours to verify Tracey’s identity with Legilimacy, so she’s been allowed out of her room. But – it’s not going very well. Finch-Fletchley nicked a case of what he calls anti-depressants from a Muggle apothecary sometime around Easter, and she was doing a little better, but then he went down in the carnage at Islington, and we ran out of the pills. I’ve lodged a requisition with Lupin, but we’re so low on resources that it’s taking a while.”

 

“What’s she on now?”

 

“Nothing. She finished her last dose three Sundays ago and we don’t have anything else.”

 

Pansy’s gut floods with unease.

 

.

.

.

 

Tracey’s curled up in bed, grey and listless. Daphne throws the windows open, trying to fan the sourness out of the room, but Pansy can taste it at the back of her throat – the accumulated stench of stale sweat, salt, and despair.

 

Pansy moves a hank of greasy hair off Tracey’s cheek, and tries not to cry.

 

.

.

.

 

The next night, she breaks into the nearest hospital and steals their entire stock of Prozac.

 

.

.

.

 

She moves back to her apartment after Boxing Day.

 

On the eve of the new millennium, the portkey back to Tracey’s safehouse rattles.

 

.

.

.

 

The funeral is brief and poorly attended – mainly because they’re all still in a war, and barely anyone can make it because they’re all spread thin and a breath away from dying, themselves.

 

Daphne donates her second-best cloak as Tracey’s shroud, weeping into the mutilated mess that Tracey had made of her forearms as she arranges the body in the flimsy wooden casket that Lupin had transfigured a young sapling into.

 

“Should we even tell her parents?”

 

Parvati has to repeat herself twice before Pansy actually hears her, and turns slowly away from the pit Lupin has just dug in a corner of the Muggle graveyard in the village nearest Tracey’s Muggle grandparents’ home – at least, what Daphne remembers Tracey said was their village, during that one Christmas when the war was still young.

 

Back at the safehouse, the sole bathtub is stained a very pale pink.

 

“We tell them the truth,” Pansy says, blinking away the memory of Tracey diving straight into the Black Lake right after their OWLs, heckling Daphne for tripping over herself while trying to unfasten her cloak to follow suit. “No matter who her mother is, and no matter what she wanted her father to believe, they both deserve to know the truth.”

 

.

.

.

 

Pansy leaves a photograph of the cages and the memory of her blasting the one holding Tracey open on Athena Fawley’s nightstand, along with the location of Tracey’s gravesite.

 

She stays long enough to watch her view the memory and throw a heavy brass candlestick at a wall before disintegrating into a sobbing mess.

 

.

.

.

 

She’s snooping around Rookwood’s home office while he’s out at the Ministry when she finds it – a receipt for a crate of dried nightshade to be delivered to an address in Birmingham, crumpled up and pinned between a stack of propaganda pamphlets and the wall.

 

A quick search through the Muggle telephone book that she always has crammed into her charmed utility bag tells her that it’s an automobile factory on the outskirts of the city. There is no telephone number listed.

 

It would take time for her to get Lupin, and if she’s right, there are _prisoners_ there, to be broken out. Prisoners like Tracey. People she can save, if she gets to them fast enough.

 

She can always call for backup later.

 

.

.

.

 

It’s half past three in the afternoon, but it’s also February, so it isn’t unusual that it’s dull and grey and foggy, with a chill that feels like it’s eating into her bones.

 

Pansy watches, disillusioned, from across the street as the odd Muggles who do pass by quicken their steps as they hurry past the chain link gate guarded by a single man lounging in a security post with the windows tightly shut.

 

Why guard an empty factory?

 

Pansy skulks round to the side of the building, away from the guard, and reaches out for wards.

 

 _There_.

 

They’re not easy to dismantle – not in the _least_. She can pick out Rookwood’s handiwork in here – she _had_ made it past his home wards, so she knows they’re not insurmountable – but these defences have been woven together by several people simultaneously, so even undoing them quietly in a section _just_ small enough for her to wriggle through is as difficult as _fuck_.

 

It’s the last strand of warding magic – the one that’s as familiar to her as the set of her jaw and the stony cut of her cheekbones – that has her pausing in her work to fight to keep her lunch down, to wipe her gloved palms unnecessarily on the dark polyester blend of her Muggle tights.

 

Her father helped to build this. Her father was here.

 

Pansy is not a Gryffindor. If asked to choose one adjective to describe herself, she would never say that she is _brave_.

 

But – it is testament to the life that Pansy has lived and the war that she has fought that she does not drop everything and _run_.

 

Because she’d tried very hard to forget that her father is still out there, somewhere, on the other side. Lupin never mentions him. She does not ask.

 

Now that she’s here, unwinding the magic she used to scrabble against whilst sobbing and bleeding, she’s afraid again.

 

She’s killed his friends. She knows she could kill him if she wanted to.

 

She’s afraid that she will, and she’s afraid that she won’t.

 

 _He may not be here_ , she chants as she widens the gap in the wards methodically, unravelling skeins of security in a widening circle. _He may not be here._

 

The sun has set by the time Pansy seals the raw edges of her work and crawls through the fence on her belly and elbows.

 

 _He may not be here_.

 

Once through, Pansy shuts her eyes and thinks _hard_ about Tracey. Tracey, pulling Daphne into the Black Lake, fully clothed. Tracey, quietly depositing an extra helping of fried chicken onto Pansy’s plate after detention. Tracey, laughing and lively and strong.

 

Tracey, gone.

 

She’s not out here doing this for herself.

 

She picks herself off the frozen ground.

 

.

.

.

 

Pansy keeps her wand aloft and the memory of sunshine at the forefront of her mind even as she shimmies through an open window and lands in a potions laboratory, black sludge bubbling away in two cast-iron cauldrons hung from the ceiling over a brilliant purple fire.

She carefully fills two spare vials from her utility bag with each potion, trying not to breathe too much of the foul steam in, and pockets them before moving on.

 

The grouting between the floor tiles is _filthy_ , but the tiles themselves are scrubbed clean, the distinctive lavender-lemony scent of a fresh _scourgify_ still in the air. Still disillusioned and masked, Pansy casts a quietfoot charm and sneaks down a hallway lined with doors opened into abandoned offices, to the main manufacturing floor of the factory.

 

Her hand is already on the emergency key in her pocket, ready to break the flimsy plastic and bring whatever strike team on duty Lupin’s got ready down to this prison, because that’s what this is – it’s Manchester all over again, with cages of captives lining the walls, silent, malnourished, and wasting away.

 

Except – there is a single man, busying himself with something at the single, massive, carved wooden dining table placed incongruously in the centre of the room.

 

 _Her_ dining table, transported from Wickentree Park, her family’s oldest country estate, where she used to watch Garrick Ollivander come in the summer to pick wand woods for his craft – where her own wand had hailed from, the magic in the land finding its way back to her.

 

Pansy knows that the man at that table will have coiling snakeweed vines embossed on the silver buckles of his shoes.

 

In another life, Pansy would have chosen the easiest path.

 

This is not that life. This is not that story.

 

_He’s here. Someone, grab him._

 

Pansy snaps the emergency key neatly in half and blows the double doors in front of her open simultaneously.

 

Her father barely has time to look up before she’s scything her wand before her, letting muscle memory take over.

 

He barely parries her disarming spell and shoots another at the ceiling, activating the anti-illusion sprinklers.

 

Her spell washing off is more of an annoyance than anything, because now she’s fighting in a drizzle, but she readjusts her grip on her wand and charges again, battering her father’s shields with _stupefy_ after _stupefy_.

 

It doesn’t escape her, that she’s casting to incapacitate, but the Order will be here soon, and they can deal with him as a prisoner – assuming that she manages to incarcerate him in time.

 

When Pansy’s been forced to actually duel, she’s managed to sequester the part of her that is _Pansy_ away, and slide into her role as a soldier.

 

All of that goes to _shit_ as she duels her father.

 

He looks much older than he was when she last saw him, cruel and wrinkled and knotted like the whomping willows her grandmother had planted on Wickentree Park’s grounds when she was barely older than Pansy herself. He duels completely silently, with none of the heckling that Avery had subjected her to, conserving his energy and throwing the bulk of his strength into his shields as he manoeuvres around the dining table.

 

It’s like running up against a brick wall, and suddenly she feels ten again, smothered and desperate.

 

She missteps.

 

One of her stunners goes wide, and he uses the opportunity to blast her back, knocking her into the bars of a cage and dislodging her mask.

 

Its occupant shrieks, and Pansy rolls away just in time to avoid the slashing spell that cuts through the metal of the cage, bringing its ceiling down. The captive lurches forward, frantic, and Pansy casts a _protego_ over him while ducking another curse. The metal slides harmlessly off her magic, but the captive thrashes against the side of the cage anyways, jostling his neighbours. Nobody is silent, now – those strong enough are shouting, rattling their cage doors, and screaming for help.

 

“Stay _put,_ ” she bellows, and her father freezes.

 

 _Fuck it_ , Pansy figures, and rips her mask from her face.

 

“Papa.”

 

He blanches, and lowers his wand. “Pansy-”

 

“ _Expelliarmus!_ ”

 

His wand hurtles through the air past her left ear – she doesn’t even bother trying to catch it, because she’s already sliding into the next part of the drill, which is –

 

“ _Stupefy-_ ”

 

Her father dodges, sprints towards a door she’d assumed led to a storage space, and heaves it open.

 

Her breath mists in the air as dementors billow out into the space.

 

 _Lead_ , she realises, struggling to stay upright. _They’d lined the dementors’ quarters in lead, so their effect would be dampened_.

 

Pansy forces her eyes to stay open. Her father is here. She’s already survived her worst nightmare. She’s this close to _beating_ it.

 

 _“Expecto Patronum_ ,” she thunders, and her bear explodes into being, rending at the oily darkness with a heavy silver paw.

 

Her bear chases the dementors up into the night where they break through the upper windows, dissipating into the night in a shower of glass and moonlight.

 

She casts a _lumos maxima_ straight up, and spies her father creeping towards the exit.

 

“ _Petrificus totalus_ ,” she says, evenly, and he stiffens, falling forward.

 

She kicks him over and squats by his body, shaking – with rage? adrenaline? – she doesn’t care to go into it right now, but she does know this:

 

“I’m not afraid of you,” she tells him, quietly. “You will probably never get the punishment you deserve, but you will never, _ever_ hurt anyone else, ever again.”

 

Held by the spell, he can’t even blink. Pansy stands, and spits in his open eyes.

 

The firecracker _pops_ of Apparition sound around her, and she scowls at Tonks, who comes over to stand next to her. It’s the first time since that mission at Greengrass & Greengrass that Pansy’s seen her, but the woman looks as spry as ever. Pansy still hates it.

 

“Parenthood’s made you slow,” she informs her, but Tonks only grins.

 

“I spend all my energy running after the toddler. I figured you’d been trained well enough to hold your own for a while. Also, the anti-Apparition wards here are a _bitch_ , did you know?”

 

Pansy shrugs and jerks her chin at her father. “I’ve got the Order a present,” she says, and tries to keep her voice light. Easy. “Do whatever you want with him, but do it in a very dark hole so that he never, _ever_ claws himself out of it.”

 

Instead of looking down at her father, Tonks reaches out and wipes at Pansy’s cheek. Her thumb comes away bloody – she hadn’t even realised that she’d been cut by the falling glass from the windows.

 

“You’ll be okay,” Tonks whispers, echoing the Order team that’s already fanning out behind them, breaking the prisoners out of their cages.

 

It’s all a bit too much, and Pansy feels herself fold in half towards her former mentor, whom she doesn’t _actually_ hate, come to think of it.

 

Not at all – not when she knows that Lupin, while already an extraordinarily good man himself, is also always extra kind to her, his wife’s protegee, who has done very little to deserve it.

 

Tonks rubs her back, and it feels like she has a mother again.

 

They’re still in a war. Pansy has fought, maimed, and assassinated, and she is still guilty about all of it.

 

But – for a moment – this moment, Pansy thinks about the quiet noise of the Muggle street outside her flat. She thinks about Draco’s calla lilies, still fresh and blooming on her coffee table.

 

She thinks about laughter, around her kitchen island.

 

They’re still in a war, but Pansy – Pansy knows that she’s won this one.

 

.

.

.

 

Before they take her father away, Pansy wrestles his family ring – none too gently, admittedly – from him, and slides it onto her index finger.

 

Pansy Parkinson is reborn.

 

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. I did check what television movies were playing on TV during Christmas 1997.  
> 2\. Do not take anti-depressants without a prescription, and certainly don't stop taking them suddenly.  
> 3\. Come find me on tumblr (if anyone still uses tumblr) at pureblxxds for anything HP related, or at elicitillicit, where I am moving through my own narrative.


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